I eat too much to die, but not enough to stay alive

Continuing my trip back through the 1994 album charts.

04/09/94 : The Holy Bible - Manic Street Preachers

Our fifth visit with the Manics and this is their last album featuring Richey Edwards - it's either the last of their early unlistenable albums or the one before they sold out, depending upon your point of view. It's one I own (taking us to six for the year) and I remember enjoying it, but haven't listened to it in decades.

Yeah, it still sounds pretty decent - it's another one that's of its time but hasn't dated. It's certainly not as polished as Everything Must Go so I can quite understand how it splits opinions but it's not as rough as I remembered. It is very raw though, there's a whole load of anger and pain on this album and it certainly sounds authentic - "4st 7lbs" rings very true as a portrayal of an anorexic (which is what Richey was at this time). I wouldn't say it was a pleasant revisit, but it was nice to be reminded of when the Manics were slightly younger than they are now - I imagine it brings back fond youthful memories for quite a few.

We're at #6 in the charts with a new entry this week on the start of a short four week run with this being as high as it got - it has been back in the charts for five subsequent runs between '94 and '04 but it's only spent eleven weeks in the chart in total - the contrast with the 104 weeks for Everything Must Go is marked. The top five this week were Oasis (a new entry), The Three Tenors (ditto), Wet Wet Wet, Cyndi Lauper and Blur, with the next highest new entry was an Elvis Presley compilation (#7) - amusingly his first best-of charted in '57, he's had at least twenty best-ofs charting over the years (and that's not including live albums and random compilations!) and he's currently at #83 in the charts with 30 Number 1 Hits, which has been in the charts for 315 weeks.

Wikipedia has more than I was expecting on the album (255 milliPeppers), with an awful lot of it going into Richey's health - let's just say he wasn't in a good place at this time. Apparently Epic Records proposed recording the album in Barbados, but that was too much "all that decadent rockstar rubbish" so they spent fours weeks in a tiny studio in Cardiff - rock and roll, baby! Themes on the album include prostitution, American consumerism, British imperialism, freedom of speech, the Holocaust, self-starvation, serial killers, the death penalty, political revolution, childhood, fascism and suicide - amusingly Q (who we don't hear from often) pointed out "even a cursory glance at the titles will confirm that this is not the new Gloria Estefan album". 

Critically, the album was very well received at the time - sadly, Select hoped that Richey had worked it all out of his system saying "let's hope that, with a record of such unsettling, morbid resonance as The Holy Bible, no further gestures are required". It's still viewed very positively retrospectively and it often pops up on various "best dark records ever" lists. Commercially, however, it really didn't get off the ground quickly and the only place it charted away from here was, somewhat unexpectedly, Japan (#48) - it's kept selling copies over the years though and by '14 had sold over half a million copies globally.

discogs.com tells us you can pick up a decent version for £1.50 but if you want the 20th anniversary box set which has a 180 gram vinyl copy, four extra CDs AND a misprint, then it's going to set you back £200 - it's what Richey would have wanted, I'm sure. This is a very intense album which I'm sure some people have dived into very deeply - I never went that far, but it was good to catch up with it again.

28/08/84 - Unnecessary nonsense
11/09/94 - Considerably more enjoyable than expected